Pork's Dirty Secret: The Nation's Top Hog Producer is Also One of America's Worst Polluters

This background review article on hog farms published in
December 2006 is of particular relevance to the recent outbreak of swine
flu.

It is increasingly apparent, from several studies and news
reports, that swine flu is a consequence of the health and environmental
conditions prevailing in the industrialised hog farms. The Mexican
outbreak originated in a hog farm in La Gloria, Veracruz, which is an
affiliate of Smithfields.

Recent press reports have pointed to the outbeak of swine flu
in a hog farm in Alberta, Canada. The Canadian media has casually
described this outbreak as a result of a "human to pig transmission of
the virus. A Mexican worker, who contracted the H1N1 virus is said to
the source of the outbreak of swine flu on the Alberta hog farm.

The fundamental question is: what are the causes as well as the
origins of the swine flu outbreak. Did it originate in Mexico or is it
the result of the toxic environment affecting pigs Worldwide in
industrial hog farms.

Michel Chossudovsky, May 4, 2009

America's top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed
rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in
EPA history. Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat.
Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the
world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering.
A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The
logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly
equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New
York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San
Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco,
Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso,
Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville,
Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.
Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying
the populations of America's thirty-two largest cities into edible packages
of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The
500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal
matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best
estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year.
That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small
pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is
not a containable amount.

Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this
year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated
its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came marginally close
to that standard -- it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow
great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit
blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and
gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company
proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution
is a linchpin of Smithfield's business model.

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is
another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a
continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to
organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. The
company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a
remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and
the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented
concentrations.

Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like
barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and
fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn
around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of
a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight,
straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall
into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can
wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their
mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes,
stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes
that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates
in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and
everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees.
The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit
and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run
twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the
ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time,
pigs start dying.

From Smithfield's point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is
immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of
confinement badly damage the pigs' immune systems. They become susceptible
to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi,
once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole
population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of
antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these
compounds -- oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin -- diseases would
likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until
they're slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill,
workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to
the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains
ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.

The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog
houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic
substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide,
phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more
than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans, including
salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog
shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.

Smithfield's holding ponds -- the company calls them lagoons -- cover as
much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can
contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid
in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and
afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and
drugs turn the lagoons pink.

Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have
transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling
lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on
surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as
"overapplication." This can turn hundreds of acres -- thousands of football
fields -- into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig
shit.

Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured by
rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and spread and
ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the liner like a hot-air
balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of
tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.

The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls
in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in
Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went
over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when
a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on
the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death.
In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was
overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to
save him but was overcome, the worker's cousin went in to save the teenager
but was overcome, the worker's older brother dived in to save them but was
overcome, and then the worker's father dived in. They all died in pig shit.

The chairman of Smithfield Foods, Joseph Luter III, is a funny, jowly,
canny, barbarous guy who lives in a multimillion-dollar condo on Park Avenue
in Manhattan and conveys himself about the planet in a corporate jet and a
private yacht. At sixty-seven, he is unrepentant in the face of criticism.
He describes himself as a "tough man in a tough business" and his factories
as wholly legitimate products of the American free market. He can be
sardonic; he likes to mock his critics and rivals.

"The animal-rights people," he once said, "want to impose a vegetarian's
society on the U.S. Most vegetarians I know are neurotic." When the
Environmental Protection Agency cited Smithfield for thousands of violations
of the Clean Water Act, Luter responded by comparing what he claimed were
the number of violations the company could theoretically have been charged
with (2.5 million, by his calculation) to the number of documented
violations up to that point (seventy-four). "A very, very small percent," he
said.

Luter grew up butchering hogs in his father's slaughterhouse, in the town
of Smithfield, Virginia. When he took over the family business forty years
ago, it was a local, marginally profitable meatpacking operation. Under
Luter, Smithfield was soon making enough money to begin purchasing
neighboring meatpackers. From the beginning, Luter thought monopolistically.
He bought out his local competition until he completely dominated the
regional pork-processing market.

But Luter was dissatisfied. The company was still buying most of its hogs
from local farmers; Luter wanted to create a system, known as "total
vertical integration," in which Smithfield controls every stage of
production, from the moment a hog is born until the day it passes through
the slaughterhouse. So he imposed a new kind of contract on farmers: The
company would own the living hogs; the contractors would raise the pigs and
be responsible for managing the hog shit and disposing of dead hogs. The
system made it impossible for small hog farmers to survive -- those who
could not handle thousands and thousands of pigs were driven out of
business. "It was a simple matter of economic power," says Eric Tabor, chief
of staff for Iowa's attorney general.

Smithfield's expansion was unique in the history of the industry: Between
1990 and 2005, it grew by more than 1,000 percent. In 1997 it was the
nation's seventh-largest pork producer; by 1999 it was the largest.
Smithfield now kills one of every four pigs sold commercially in the United
States. As Smithfield expanded, it consolidated its operations, clustering
millions of fattening hogs around its slaughterhouses. Under Luter, the
company was turning into a great pollution machine: Smithfield was suddenly
producing unheard-of amounts of pig shit laced with drugs and chemicals.
According to the EPA, Smithfield's largest farm-slaughterhouse operation --
in Tar Heel, North Carolina -- dumps more toxic waste into the nation's
water each year than all but three other industrial facilities in America.

Luter likes to tell this story: An old man and his grandson are walking
in a cemetery. They see a tombstone that reads here lies charles w. johnson,
a man who had no enemies.

"Gee, Granddad," the boy says, "this man must have been a great man. He
had no enemies."

"Son," the grandfather replies, "if a man didn't have any enemies, he
didn't do a damn thing with his life."

If Luter were to set this story in Ivy Hill Cemetery in his hometown of
Smithfield, it would be an object lesson in how to make enemies. Back when
he was growing up, the branches of the cemetery's trees were bent with the
weight of scores of buzzards. The waste stream from the Luters' meatpacking
plant, with its thickening agents of pig innards and dead fish, flowed
nearby. Luter learned the family trade well. Last year, before he retired as
CEO of Smithfield, he took home $10,802,134. He currently holds $19,296,000
in unexercised stock options.

One day this fall, a retired Marine Corps colonel and environmental
activist named Rick Dove, the former riverkeeper of North Carolina's Neuse
River, arranged to have me flown over Smithfield's operation in North
Carolina. Dove, a focused guy of sixty-seven years, is unable to talk about
corporate hog farming without becoming angry. After he got out of the Marine
Corps in 1987, he became a commercial fisherman, which he had wanted to do
since he was a kid. He was successful, and his son went into business with
him. Then industrial hog farming arrived and killed the fish, and both Dove
and his son got seriously ill.

Dove and other activists provide the only effective oversight of
corporate hog farming in the area. The industry has long made generous
campaign contributions to politicians responsible for regulating hog farms.
In 1995, while Smithfield was trying to persuade the state of Virginia to
reduce a large fine for the company's pollution, Joseph Luter gave $100,000
to then-governor George Allen's political-action committee. In 1998,
corporate hog farms in North Carolina spent $1 million to help defeat state
legislators who wanted to clean up open-pit lagoons. The state has
consistently failed to employ enough inspectors to ensure that hog farms are
complying with environmental standards.

To document violations, Dove and other activists regularly hire private
planes to inspect corporate hog operations from the air. The airport Dove
uses, in New Bern, North Carolina, is tiny; the plane he uses, a 1975 Cessna
single-prop, looks tiny even in the tiny airport. Its cabin has four cracked
yellow linoleum seats. It looks like the interior of a 1975 VW bug, but with
more dials. The pilot, Joe Corby, is older than I expected him to be.

"I have a GPS, so I can kinda guide you," Dove says to Corby while we
taxi to the runway.

"Oh, you do!" Corby says, apparently unaccustomed to such a luxury.
"Well, OK."

We take off. "Bunch of turkey buzzards," Dove says, looking out the
window. "They're big."

We climb to 2,000 feet and head toward the densest concentration of hogs
in the world. The landscape at first is unsuspiciously pastoral -- fields
planted in corn or soybeans or cotton, tree lines staking creeks, a few
unincorporated villages of prefab houses. But then we arrive at the global
locus of hog farming, and the countryside turns into an immense subdivision
for pigs. Hog farms that contract with Smithfield differ slightly in
dimension but otherwise look identical: parallel rows of six, eight or
twelve one-story hog houses, some nearly the size of a football field,
containing as many as 10,000 hogs, and backing onto a single large lagoon.
From the air I see that the lagoons come in two shades of pink: dark or
Pepto Bismol -- vile, freaky colors in the middle of green farmland.

From the plane, Smithfield's farms replicate one another as far as I can
see in every direction. Visibility is about four miles. I count the lagoons.
There are 103. That works out to at least 50,000 hogs per square mile. You
could fly for an hour, Dove says, and all you would see is corporate hog
operations, with little towns of modular homes and a few family farms
pinioned amid them.

Studies have shown that lagoons emit hundreds of different volatile gases
into the atmosphere, including ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen
sulfide. A single lagoon releases many millions of bacteria into the air per
day, some resistant to human antibiotics. Hog farms in North Carolina also
emit some 300 tons of nitrogen into the air every day as ammonia gas, much
of which falls back to earth and deprives lakes and streams of oxygen,
stimulating algal blooms and killing fish.

Looking down from the plane, we watch as several of Smithfield's farmers
spray their hog shit straight up into the air as a fine mist: It looks like
a public fountain. Lofted and atomized, the shit is blown clear of the
company's property. People who breathe the shit-infused air suffer from
bronchitis, asthma, heart palpitations, headaches, diarrhea, nosebleeds and
brain damage. In 1995, a woman downwind from a corporate hog farm in Olivia,
Minnesota, called a poison-control center and described her symptoms.
"Ma'am," the poison-control officer told her, "the only symptoms of
hydrogen-sulfide poisoning you're not experiencing are seizures, convulsions
and death. Leave the area immediately." When you fly over eastern North
Carolina, you realize that virtually everyone in this part of the state
lives close to a lagoon.

Each of the company's lagoons is surrounded by several fields. Pollution
control at Smithfield consists of spraying the pig shit from the lagoons
onto the fields to fertilize them. The idea is borrowed from the past: The
small hog farmers that Smithfield drove out of business used animal waste to
fertilize their crops, which they then fed to the pigs. Smithfield says that
this, in essence, is what it does -- its crops absorb every ounce of its pig
shit, making the lagoon-sprayfield system a zero-discharge, nonpolluting
waste-disposal operation. "If you manage your fields correctly, there should
be no runoff, no pollution," says Dennis Treacy, Smithfield's vice president
of environmental affairs. "If you're getting runoff, you're doing something
wrong."

In fact, Smithfield doesn't grow nearly enough crops to absorb all of its
hog weight. The company raises so many pigs in so little space that it
actually has to import the majority of their food, which contains large
amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus. Those chemicals -- discharged in pig
shit and sprayed on fields -- run off into the surrounding ecosystem,
causing what Dan Whittle, a former senior policy associate with the North
Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, calls a "mass
imbalance." At one point, three hog-raising counties in North Carolina were
producing more nitrogen, and eighteen were producing more phosphorus, than
all the crops in the state could absorb.

As we fly over the hog farms, I notice that springs and streams and
swamplands and lakes are everywhere. Eastern North Carolina is a coastal
plain, grooved and tilted towards the sea -- and Smithfield's sprayfields
almost always incline toward creeks or creek-fed swamps. Half-perforated
pipes called irrigation tiles, commonly used in modern farming, run beneath
many of the fields; when they become unplugged, the tiles effectively
operate as drainpipes, dumping pig waste into surrounding tributaries. Many
studies have documented the harm caused by hog-waste runoff; one showed the
pig shit raising the level of nitrogen and phosphorus in a receiving river
as much as sixfold. In eastern North Carolina, nine rivers and creeks in the
Cape Fear and Neuse River basins have been classified by the state as either
"negatively impacted" or environmentally "impaired."

Although Smithfield may not have enough crops to absorb its pig shit, its
contract farmers do plant plenty of hay. In 1992, when the number of hogs in
North Carolina began to skyrocket, so much hay was planted to deal with the
fresh volumes of pig shit that the market for hay collapsed. But the hay
from hog farms can be so nitrate-heavy that it sickens livestock. For a
while, former governor Jim Hunt -- a recipient of hog-industry campaign
money -- was feeding hog-farm hay to his cows. Locals say it made the cows
sick and irritable, and the animals kicked Hunt several times, seemingly in
revenge. It's a popular tale in eastern North Carolina.

To appreciate what this agglomeration of hog production does to the
people who live near it, you have to appreciate the smell of
industrial-strength pig shit. The ascending stench can nauseate pilots at
3,000 feet. On the day we fly over Smithfield's operation there is little
wind to stir up the lagoons or carry the stink, and the region's current
drought means that lagoon operators aren't spraying very frequently. It is
the best of times. We can smell the farms from the air, but while the smell
is foul it is intermittent and not particularly strong.

To get a really good whiff, I drive down a narrow country road of white
sand and walk up to a Smithfield lagoon. At the end of the road stands a
tractor and some spraying equipment. The fetid white carcass of a hog lies
in a dumpster known as a "dead box." Flies cover the hog's snout. Its hooves
look like high heels. Millions of factory-farm hogs -- one study puts it at
ten percent -- die before they make it to the killing floor. Some are taken
to rendering plants, where they are propelled through meat grinders and then
fed cannibalistically back to other living hogs. Others are dumped into big
open pits called "dead holes," or left in the dumpsters for so long that
they swell and explode. The borders of hog farms are littered with dead pigs
in all stages of decomposition, including thousands of bleached pig bones.
Locals like to say that the bears and buzzards of eastern North Carolina are
unusually lazy and fat.

No one seems to be around. It is quiet except for the gigantic exhaust
fans affixed to the six hog houses. There is an unwholesome tang in the air,
but there is no wind and it isn't hot, so I can't smell the lagoon itself. I
walk the few hundred yards over to it. It is covered with a thick film; its
edge is a narrow beach of big black flies. Here, its odor is leaking out. I
take a deep breath.

Concentrated manure is my first thought, but I am fighting an impulse to
vomit even as I am thinking it. I've probably smelled stronger odors in my
life, but nothing so insidiously and instantaneously nauseating. It takes my
mind a second or two to get through the odor's first coat. The smell at its
core has a frightening, uniquely enriched putridity, both deep-sweet and
high-sour. I back away from it and walk back to the car but I remain sick --
it's a shivery, retchy kind of nausea -- for a good five minutes. That's
apparently characteristic of industrial pig shit: It keeps making you sick
for a good while after you've stopped smelling it. It's an unduly invasive,
adhesive smell. Your whole body reacts to it. It's as if something has
physically entered your stomach. A little later I am driving and I catch a
crosswind stench -- it must have been from a stirred-up lagoon -- and from
the moment it hit me a timer in my body started ticking: You can only
function for so long in that smell. The memory of it makes you gag.

Unsurprisingly, prolonged exposure to hog-factory stench makes the smell
extremely hard to get off. Hog factory workers stink up every store they
walk into. I run into a few local guys who had made the mistake of accepting
jobs in hog houses, and they tell me that you just have to wait the smell
out: You'll eventually grow new hair and skin. If you work in a Smithfield
hog house for a year and then quit, you might stink for the next three
months.
If the temperature and wind aren't right and the lagoon operators are
spraying, people in hog country can't hang laundry or sit on their porches
or mow their lawns. Epidemiological studies show that those who live near
hog lagoons suffer from abnormally high levels of depression, tension,
anger, fatigue and confusion. "We are used to farm odors," says one local
farmer. "These are not farm odors." Sometimes the stink literally knocks
people down: They walk out of the house to get something in the yard and
become so nauseous they collapse. When they retain consciousness, they crawl
back into the house.

That has happened several times to Julian and Charlotte Savage, an
elderly couple whose farmland now abuts a Smithfield sprayfield -- one of
several meant to absorb the shit of 50,000 hogs. The Savages live in a
small, modular kit house. Sitting in the kitchen, Charlotte tells me that
she once saw Julian collapse in the yard and ran out and threw a coat over
his head and dragged him back inside. Before Smithfield arrived, Julian's
family farmed the land for the better part of a century. He raised tobacco,
corn, wheat, turkeys and chickens. Now he has respiratory problems and
rarely attempts to go outside.

Behind the house, a creek bordering the sprayfield flows into a swamp;
the Savages have seen hog waste running right into the creek. Once, during a
flood, the Savages found pig shit six inches deep pooled around their house.
They had to drain it by digging trenches, which took three weeks. Charlotte
has noticed that nitrogen fallout keeps the trees around the house a deep
synthetic green. There's a big buzzard population.

The Savages say they can keep the pig-shit smell out of their house by
shutting the doors and windows, but to me the walls reek faintly. They have
a windbreak -- an eighty-foot-wide strip of forest -- between their house
and the fields. They know people who don't, though, and when the smell is
bad, those people, like everyone, shut their windows and slam their front
doors shut quickly behind them, but their coffee and spaghetti and carrots
still smell and taste like pig shit.

The Savages have had what seemed to be hog shit in their bath water.
Their well water, which was clean before Smithfield arrived, is now suspect.
"I try not to drink it," Charlotte says. "We mostly just drink drinks, soda
and things." While we talk, Julian spends most of the time on the living
room couch; his lungs are particularly bad today. Then he comes into the
kitchen. Among other things, he says: I can't breathe it, it'll put you on
the ground; you can't walk, you fall down; you breathe you gon' die; you go
out and smell it one time and your ass is gone; it's not funny to be around
it. It's not funny, honey. He could have said all this somewhat
tragicomically, with a thin smile, but instead he cries the whole time.

Smithfield is not just a virtuosic polluter; it is also a theatrical one.
Its lagoons are historically prone to failure. In North Carolina alone they
have spilled, in a span of four years, 2 million gallons of shit into the
Cape Fear River, 1.5 million gallons into its Persimmon Branch, one million
gallons into the Trent River and 200,000 gallons into Turkey Creek. In
Virginia, Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of
the Clean Water Act -- the third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the
act by the EPA. It amounted to .035 percent of Smithfield's annual sales.

A river that receives a lot of waste from an industrial hog farm begins
to die quickly. Toxins and microbes can kill plants and animals outright;
the waste itself consumes available oxygen and suffocates fish and aquatic
animals; and the nutrients in the pig shit produce algal blooms that also
deoxygenate the water. The Pagan River runs by Smithfield's original plant
and headquarters in Virginia, which served as Joseph Luter's staging ground
for his assault on the pork-raising and processing industries. For several
decades, before a spate of regulations, the Pagan had no living marsh grass,
a tiny and toxic population of fish and shellfish and a half foot of noxious
black mud coating its bed. The hulls of boats winched up out of the river
bore inch-thick coats of greasy muck. In North Carolina, much of the pig
waste from Smithfield's operations makes its way into the Neuse River; in a
five-day span in 2003 alone, more than 4 million fish died. Pig-waste runoff
has damaged the Albemarle-Pamlico Sound, which is almost as big as the
Chesapeake Bay and which provides half the nursery grounds used by fish in
the eastern Atlantic.

The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming happened in
1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by a Smithfield
competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of effluvium into the
headwaters of the New River in North Carolina. It was the biggest
environmental spill in United States history, more than twice as big as the
Exxon Valdez oil spill six years earlier. The sludge was so toxic it burned
your skin if you touched it, and so dense it took almost two months to make
its way sixteen miles downstream to the ocean. From the headwaters to the
sea, every creature living in the river was killed. Fish died by the
millions.

It's hard to conceive of a fish kill that size. The kill began with
turbulence in one small part of the water: fish writhing and dying. Then it
spread in patches along the entire length and breadth of the river. In two
hours, dead and dying fish were mounded wherever the river's contours slowed
the current, and the riverbanks were mostly dead fish. Within a day dead
fish completely covered the riverbanks, and between the floating and beached
and piled fish the water scintillated out of sight up and down the river
with billions of buoyant dead eyes and scales and white bellies -- more fish
than the river seemed capable of holding. The smell of rotting fish covered
much of the county; the air above the river was chaotic with scavenging
birds. There were far more dead fish than the birds could ever eat.

Spills aren't the worst thing that can happen to toxic pig waste lying
exposed in fields and lagoons. Hurricanes are worse. In 1999, Hurricane
Floyd washed 120,000,000 gallons of unsheltered hog waste into the Tar,
Neuse, Roanoke, Pamlico, New and Cape Fear rivers. Many of the pig-shit
lagoons of eastern North Carolina were several feet underwater. Satellite
photographs show a dark brown tide closing over the region's waterways,
converging on the Albemarle-Pamlico Sound and feeding itself out to sea in a
long, well-defined channel. Very little freshwater marine life remained
behind. Tens of thousands of drowned pigs were strewn across the land.
Beaches located miles from Smithfield lagoons were slathered in feces. A
picture taken at the time shows a shark eating a dead pig three miles off
the North Carolina coast.

From a waste-disposal perspective, Hurricane Floyd was the best thing
that had ever happened to corporate hog farming in North Carolina.
Smithfield currently has tens of thousands of gallons of open-air waste
awaiting more Floyds.

In addition to such impressive disasters, corporate hog farming
contributes to another form of environmental havoc: Pfiesteria piscicida, a
microbe that, in its toxic form, has killed a billion fish and injured
dozens of people. Nutrient-rich waste like pig shit creates the ideal
environment for Pfiesteria to bloom: The microbe eats fish attracted to
algae nourished by the waste. Pfiesteria is invisible and odorless -- you
know it by the trail of dead. The microbe degrades a fish's skin, laying
bare tissue and blood cells; it then eats its way into the fish's body.
After the 1995 spill, millions of fish developed large bleeding sores on
their sides and quickly died. Fishermen found that at least one of
Pfiesteria's toxins could take flight: Breathing the air above the bloom
caused severe respiratory difficulty, headaches, blurry vision and logical
impairment. Some fishermen forgot how to get home; laboratory workers
exposed to Pfiesteria lost the ability to solve simple math problems and
dial phones; they forgot their own names. It could take weeks or months for
the brain and lungs to recover.

Smithfield is no longer able to disfigure watersheds quite so obviously
as in the past; it can no longer expand and flatten small pig farms quite so
easily. Several state legislatures have passed laws prohibiting or limiting
the ownership of small farms by pork processors. In some places, new
slaughterhouses are required to meet expensive waste-disposal requirements;
many are forbidden from using the waste-lagoon system. North Carolina, where
pigs now outnumber people, has passed a moratorium on new hog operations and
ordered Smithfield to fund research into alternative waste-disposal
technologies. South Carolina, having taken a good look at its neighbor's
coastal plain, has pronounced the company unwelcome in the state. The
federal government and several states have challenged some of Smithfield's
recent acquisition deals and, in a few instances, have forced the company to
agree to modify its waste-lagoon systems.

These initiatives, of course, come comically late. Industrial hog
operations control at least seventy-five percent of the market. Smithfield's
market dominance is hardly at risk: Twenty-six percent of the pork processed
in this country is Smithfield pork. The company's expansion does not seem to
be slowing down: Over the past two years, Smithfield's annual sales grew by
$1.5 billion. In September, the company announced that it is merging with
Premium Standard Farms, the nation's second-largest hog farmer and
sixth-largest pork processor. If the deal goes through, Smithfield will own
more pigs than the next eight largest pork producers in the nation combined.
The company's market leverage and political clout will allow it to produce
ever greater quantities of hog waste.

Smithfield points to the improvements it has made to its waste-disposal
systems in recent years. In 2003, Smithfield announced that it was investing
$20 million in a program to turn its pig shit in Utah into alternative fuel.
It now produces approximately 2,500 gallons a day of biomethanol and has
begun building a facility in Texas to produce clean-burning biodiesel fuel.

"We're paying a lot of attention to energy right now," says Treacy, the
Smithfield vice president. "We've come such a long way in the last five
years." The company, he adds, has undergone a "complete cultural shift on
environmental matters."

But cultural shifts, no matter how genuine, cannot counter the
unalterable physical reality of Smithfield Foods itself. "All of a sudden we
have this 800-pound gorilla in the pork industry," Successful Farming
magazine warned -- six years ago. There simply is no regulatory solution to
the millions of tons of searingly fetid, toxic effluvium that industrial hog
farms discharge and aerosolize on a daily basis. Smithfield alone has
sixteen operations in twelve states. Fixing the problem completely would
bankrupt the company. According to Dr. Michael Mallin, a marine scientist at
the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who has researched the
effects of corporate farming on water quality, the volumes of concentrated
pig waste produced by industrial hog farms are plainly not containable in
small areas. The land, he says, "just can't absorb everything that comes out
of the barns." From the moment that Smithfield attained its current size,
its waste-disposal problem became conventionally insoluble.

Joe Luter, like his pig shit, has an innate aversion to being contained
in any way. Ever since American regulators and lawmakers started forcing
Smithfield to spend more money on waste treatment and attempting to limit
the company's expansion, Luter has been looking to do business elsewhere. In
recent years, his gaze has fallen on the lucrative and unregulated markets
of Poland.

In 1999, Luter bought a state-owned company called Animex, one of
Poland's biggest hog processors. Then he began doing business through a
Polish subsidiary called Prima Farms, acquiring huge moribund Communist-era
hog farms and converting them into concentrated feeding operations. Pork
prices in Poland were low, so Smithfield's sweeping expansion didn't make
strict economic sense, except that it had the virtue of pushing small hog
farmers toward bankruptcy. By 2003, Animex was operating six subsidiary
companies and seven processing plants, selling nine brands of meat and
taking in $338 million annually.

The usual violations occurred. Near one of Smithfield's largest plants,
in Byszkowo, an enormous pool of frozen pig shit, pumped into a lagoon in
winter, melted and ran into two nearby lakes. The lake water turned brown;
residents in local villages got skin rashes and eye infections; the stench
made it impossible to eat. A recent report to the Helsinki Commission found
that Smithfield's pollution throughout Poland was damaging the country's
ecosystems. Overapplication was endemic. Farmers without permits were piping
liquid pig shit directly into watersheds that fed into the Baltic Sea.

When Joseph Luter entered Poland, he announced that he planned to turn
the country into the "Iowa of Europe." Iowa has always been America's
biggest hog producer and remains the nation's chief icon of hog farming.
Having subdued Poland, Luter announced this summer that all of Eastern
Europe -- "particularly Romania" -- should become the "Iowa of Europe."
Seventy-five percent of Romania's hogs currently come from household farms.
Over the next five years, Smithfield plans to spend $800 million in Romania
to change that.

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